Remember senior year of high school? Remember applying to various colleges and universities, perfecting essays, taking multitudes of standardized tests? Remember the anticipation and anxiety while waiting to receive admission decisions? Well, then certainly you, dear readers, must remember the Golden Rule of letters from schools: thin envelope = bad, thick envelope = good.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about taking a test from Mensa to see if I qualified for membership. Today, I received an envelope in the mail from American Mensa – and it was thick. “Congratulations!” the enclosed letter began. “Your Mensa Admissions test has been scored and, based on the percentile rank, you qualify for admission to Mensa.” Well, great: I feel vindicated now – I didn’t buy the world’s most expensive fifth of water!

To celebrate, I decided to purchase a new dictionary. All of my previous dictionaries have been relatively small (roughly 70,000 entries), so I’ve always resorted to Dictionary.com for definitions to obscure words. However, there is a certain warm intimacy present in a physical book that a web site lacks. With that in mind, I went to Barnes and Noble (the brick-and-mortar version, not the web site) and found “Webster’s Universal Encyclopedic Dictionary,” which, based on the copyright information, appears to be a Barnes and Noble printing of a Merriam-Webster dictionary. I knew I had found the perfect dictionary when I saw that the entry for “euphonium” included a line-art drawing; the 330,000 other entries helped seal the deal.

Other random stuff from the past week: I went on a riverboat cruise down the Mississippi, complete with catered dinner, courtesy of Medtronic. I had lunch with the Medtronic Neuro Division president. I played hockey again on Thursday. This article is amusing, especially in light of the Ways and Means tiff last week. Minufo posted a link to the Political Compass Quiz, which I found rather interesting. In case you were wondering, I’m at (1.12, -4.21). It appears that Aymond might be coming back to Rose, which would be cool. Voda is stirring things up. Hmmm… what else… Well, how about we finish with a cartoon? Aw, crap: It looks like Doonesbury, my favorite comic strip, has sold out to Slate and the archive is fubar, so I can’t link to the strip I wanted. D’oh! Amuse yourself with Dilbert instead.